


All Held in Doubt

by ncfan



Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: Ambiguous manipulation, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon Speculation, Clumsy emotional hurt/comfort but still hurt/comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gap Filler, Gen, Grandmothers, Headcanon Autistic Character, Headcanon Autistic Star, Introspection, Late Night Conversations, Missing Scene, Morally Ambiguous Character, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-11 06:10:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12929190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Star goes exploring secret passageways with her morally ambiguous grandma. [Set between 'Sweet Dreams' and 'Deep Dive.']





	All Held in Doubt

“So, how long have these tunnels been here?” Star pushed a dangling tree root out of the way as she followed after Eclipsa, and frowned as she looked to the wall on her left-hand side and saw that it was just a gnarled, knobby mass of tree roots, like tangled fingers reaching into the earth. Water ran down them in rivulets, cold and dark. Come to think of it, the floor was a lot rougher here than it had been when they were still descending. Were they under one of the gardens? “I bet they’re _ancient_.”

Picking her way carefully through the roots, Eclipsa waved a hand vaguely. “I’m not entirely sure, myself. I told you, they were already around when I was your age. They already seemed quite old back then. When I went to the Royal Archives, I couldn’t find them on any of the sets of blueprints available, though. There wasn’t even a reference to them in the notes.”

Star stared at her for a moment, before a grin unfurled on her face. “So, does that mean these were, like, escape tunnels or something?” Her grin widened; she giggled a little. “Or maybe warriors used them to ambush invaders during an attack! Or maybe they were for surprise birthday parties!”

Eclipsa blinked rapidly, her pale face frozen, before answering, “Perhaps. Certainly, the most likely explanation is also the most boring.”

“Well, what’s that?”

“The original blueprints and all the oldest ones up until five hundred—no, it will have been eight hundred years now—years ago for the castle and the grounds were lost long before I was born.” They came to a fork in the passage where both ways were dark; Eclipsa paused, frowning. “These may well have been the original servants’ passages, and were left out of subsequent blueprints because no one thought them important enough to warrant inclusion.”

When she said it like that, that did make sense. And yeah, it was boring. “I like my ideas better,” Star muttered.

“As do I.” Eclipsa walked up to a torch holder and whispered to it, cupping her hand around her mouth. A moment later, golden light flared in the passage, the torch holders all flickering with light that cast no heat, but illuminated a narrow tunnel that slowly began to crawl upwards again—or maybe the ceiling was just getting lower; it was hard to tell with all the shadows.

 _I’ve gotta get someone to show me how to do that_ , Star thought with some envy.

Eclipsa flashed a sly smile her way and pointed down the passage. “The most likely explanation for these passages certainly doesn’t explain _him_.”

Star looked to where Eclipsa was pointing and immediately stiffened, suddenly feeling rather strange.

About ten feet down the bumpy earthen passage there was a great heap of armor, so badly rusted that it must have been ancient—Earth iron and steel might have started rusting lickety-split, but the Mewnian stuff was made to _last_. And peeking out from the helmet, there was…

“Sooo…” Star knelt down by the dead man and poked his red, crusty breastplate with the handle of her wand. “How’d this guy get here?”

Eclipsa shrugged. “I’ve no idea. He was already here when I was a child. These tunnels were my own, secret place. I didn’t want anyone else to know about them, so I never told anyone about him.” She started to walk down the tunnel again, the sound of her footsteps barely registering to Star’s ears. She stopped and turned round when Star didn’t follow after her right away. Her gray eyes shone in the torchlight. “Come along, dear; we’ve still a-ways to go.”

Star frowned lightly, but after a moment, followed after her.

Most of her nights right now were devoted to travelling through dimensions in her sleep. _Where_ exactly she was trying to get to, Star didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she was trying to get _anywhere_ ; Star’s dream-memories weren’t distinct enough to give her a clear idea of where all she was going, except that she was making a lot of raids on Roy’s Goblin Dog truck. Sleep-portalling must have made her hungry, was all she could figure. Honestly, it’d be cool if she wasn’t trying to get anywhere, if only Star knew or not if she had a destination in mind when she did this.

None of the times she’d gone off like that had been too bad, not since that time with Marco when she’d woken up and her wings had dissolved and they’d nearly gone screaming into the void. (It had been a good thing Eclipsa had shown up when she had. _‘It’s_ convenient _that she showed up when she did_ ,’ Marco had pointed out later. He… he was right, but for whatever reason, Star didn’t want to look at it like that.) Most of her sleep-portalling, what she could remember of it, had been really fun. She mostly just wished she could remember where she’d been better, so she could go visit while she was awake.

Most nights, she’d be actively looking forward to sleep-portalling, but tonight she hadn’t been able to fall asleep at all. Her mind was racing with worries about that petition she and Marco had drawn up. How would her parents find out? Should she even _tell_ her parents? Would she be able to get the other princesses and princes to sign it? Would she be bitten by a spider when she went to see Princess Spiderbite? You know, stuff like that. Her mind was racing, wouldn’t slow down, with the end result being that Star Butterfly could not sleep.

Rather than spend all night staring up at the ceiling, Star had decided to go exploring in the secret passageways Eclipsa had shown her. It wouldn’t kill her to find out more about her home, and besides, exploring secret passageways that apparently only she and Eclipsa knew about sounded fun. It was the dead of night, so it wasn’t like anyone was going to miss her, anyways, not since she’d convinced Marco that he didn’t need to sit watch and wait for her to come back every night.

She had gone exploring, wand in hand, only to quickly discover the downside to exploring a convoluted network of secret passageways when you didn’t already know your way around and you didn’t have a map. That is to say, she got hopelessly lost. Now, that wasn’t a super bad problem. Star knew she could find her way back to her room eventually so long as she didn’t give up, and if push came to shove, she could always use her wand to blast her way out. But still, these passageways were worse than Quest Buy—you couldn’t make heads or tails of them.

Well, Star couldn’t. Eclipsa, on the other hand…

_“Oh, Star; fancy meeting you here.”_

_“…Eclipsa? …What are you doing here?”_

_“Looking for you, actually. I have something to show you, if you care to see it.”_

…Eclipsa always seemed to know exactly where she was going. Which raised a lot more questions than it answered, to be honest.

“So, Eclipsa…” Star twisted the bell of her wand on and off, on and off and on again. She brought the bell up to her mouth before remembering that she had a question to ask. “You told me you used these tunnels a lot when you were a kid, right?”

“I first discovered them when I was about twelve years old. After that, yes, constantly.”

“Right right right.” Star frowned. “What’d you use them for? ‘Cause, you know, this place…”

This place was way too easy to get lost in, and even someone down here with a purpose would probably still have a hard time doing what they needed to do.

Eclipsa ran a hand (black, black as coal at the fingertips, purplish-black elsewhere, pumping blood that looked from the surface more like pitch, and was there something swirling under her skin? Star wasn’t quite sure) over the cold, damp, rough-hewn wall. She smiled, that smile Star couldn’t help but think was just a little too animate for such a smooth, still face. Then again, most of her expressions were like that—it was like if a porcelain doll got up and started moving around and talking. It wasn’t Eclipsa’s fault she had a face like that, but still… “If I told you that I used them to conduct ritual Mewman sacrifice, would you run and tell your mother and the Magic High Commission?”

Star stared at her, head tilted slightly to one side. “That……… was a joke……”

“But not a very good one, I suppose?” Eclipsa’s too-animate smile was affixed to her face, but now there was something in it that Star thought might be embarrassment; it was even harder to tell with Eclipsa than it was with other people. “My jokes don’t seem to be landing at all anymore. Humor seems to have changed its shape in the past three hundred years.”

“I… I……” Star tugged on a lock of her hair, shuffling her feet. “Ummmmmm…”

That probably wasn’t the only thing that was really different about Mewni now that three hundred years had passed. History classes on Earth had given her an idea of how much Earth had changed in three hundred years… Well, more like talking to Jackie about history had given her an idea of how much Earth had changed in three hundred years, but still, if things had changed so much on Earth, Star couldn’t imagine how much they’d changed on Mewni. It made her wish she’d paid more attention to her history tutor when she was getting lessons before her parents had sent her to Earth. It made her wish—

“Don’t worry about it, Star,” Eclipsa said lightly. “It was just a joke—and a bad one, at that.”

Her smile took on a conspiratorial edge, but Star couldn’t quite reflect it back at her. Thinking about how Mewni must have changed while Eclipsa was crystallized was making her feel a little sick.

They kept walking on down the passageway, as the floor (and ceiling too, thankfully) began to slope upwards. Gently, at first, but then more steeply, until Star stubbed her toe against something and looked down to realize that there were steps cut into the floor here, as there had been in her tower and the surrounding area.

Up ahead, the passage was blocked, nearly all the way up to the ceiling, by a heap of rubble, dust and stone and bits of twisted iron. Eclipsa clambered over it like a child would climb over a “hill” they made in a sandbox—confidently, trusting without question its inability to hurt her. She waved encouragingly to Star from the top of the heap, and Star followed her after only a moment’s hesitation. Eclipsa was bigger than her, and the heap had supported her weight without shifting too much. Besides, it wasn’t like the roof of the rose tower had ever come crashing down on their heads, and that place was supposed to be condemned; climbing over this heap of rubble wasn’t nearly as dangerous as living in the rose tower.

Past the heap of rubble, things were very different. The floor, though cold and rough, was cut from stone rather than earth; the steps had edges that looked like they’d cut Star’s shins to ribbons if she let them. The walls were much the same, cold, dry stone that likely hadn’t felt a Mewman hand on them in centuries. But there was something else, something that got Star’s attention and held it fast.

“Are those _doors_?” she blurted out, pointing towards the doors that appeared at random intervals down the winding passageway. Unable to hide her grin, unwilling to even try.

“Yes, we’ve entered the main part of the castle.” Eclipsa was poring over the flagstones on the floor. “Now,” she muttered, “I know it was around here somewhere; where did I leave it?”

Star tilted her head. “What’re you looking for?”

Before she could go over to help, Eclipsa groped at a loose flagstone and overturned it, letting out a small, triumphant “Aha!” She picked something off of the floor where the loose flagstone had been, dusted herself off, and stood back up. She held the thing she had picked up behind her back, her eyes glittering as she explained, “There are many doors leading in and out of the passageways in this part of the castle. There are no locks on the other sides; you must merely be polite. However, there are locks on this side, so to open them we need—“ she took out what she was holding behind her back and giggled “—a skeleton key!”

She held in her blackened hands a large key. The upper handle was comprised of a tiny ribcage and grinning skull, painted in white enamel that was beginning to flake away. The lower handle, the pin and the bit, on the other hand, sparkled in the torchlight, untarnished gold.

“Eee, that’s so cute!” Star exclaimed, taking it out of Eclipsa’s hands and holding it close to one of the torches for a better look. The gold was cold as ice on her hands, so cold it burned, but slowly, ever so slowly, it grew a little warmer.

“There are many of these keys scattered throughout the passageways.” With some difficulty, Eclipsa hefted the loose flagstone in her arms and held it up to the light. She pointed out a crude spade etched on the gray stone. “If ever you find yourself stranded in the passages without your wand, look for a flagstone with a spade etched on it. There should be one close to your tower.”

Star barely found time to nod before excitement overtook her and she pointed towards the row of doors, hopping up and down a little. “Can we go look through some of these doors? This is amazing; I can’t believe I never knew this was here! Oh, corn, sneaking out to go clubbing with Pony Head would have been _so_ much easier if I’d known about these!”

Eclipsa paused, seemingly thrown by the outburst, but then she eyed the nearest door and smiled. “I don’t see why we can’t peek through a few. It will be several hours before morning; there’s still plenty of time for what I want to do. If a door we open leads to someone’s bedchamber, we’ll have to be careful to avoid waking them,” she warned.

Too giddy to try to be serious, Star waved a hand in the air. “Careful, shmareful. I can be careful; I’ll be as quiet as a mouse. So can I?” She grinned so hugely it almost hurt.

“Be my guest.”

It was with more than a little difficulty that Star got the door open. The hinges were made of gold, so it wasn’t like they were rusted or tarnished, but still, the door was nearly as heavy as the great doors into the throne room. At least Star thought so.

The first door open yielded up what Star dimly recognized as being someone’s bedroom. At first, she couldn’t tell whose; all the curtains were shut, and there was no fire in the grate. But when Star stuck her head out the doorway, peering into the darkness, she got a whiff of an overpowering, very familiar cologne. She drew back, scowling. “It’s Count Mildrew’s rooms!” she hissed in disgust, slamming the door shut, uncaring of whether or not he heard her.

Eclipsa raised an eyebrow. “And who is Count Mildrew?” She wrinkled her nose. “Asides from being a man with wretched taste in cologne?”

Star scuffed at the ground with her foot. “He’s some creepy guy who tries to hit on my mom whenever Dad’s not in the room,” she grumbled. “He’s gross.”

“Your mother allows this?” Eclipsa asked skeptically.

“Hey, I said ‘tries to hit on my mom,’ not ‘actually hits on my mom,’” Star retorted. “She can usually shut him down pretty quick.”

There’d even been that time about five years ago during a harvest feast. Dad was off visiting the Johansen clan, and Count Mildrew had tried getting fresh with his liege lord. And Mom? Mom had stabbed him in the back of the hand with a massive serving fork. Of course, oh-so-proper Moon the Undaunted would never admit to having done it on purpose, but even Star could tell her apology seemed a bit, shall we say, _unenthusiastic_. But the real danger hadn’t even come from the fork stabbing. No, the real danger had come from Count Mildrew fainting headfirst into a gigantic soup tureen. He’d nearly drowned before Lady Whosits fished him out. It was the most fun Star had ever had at a harvest feast.

Eclipsa laughed a brittle laugh. “I see certain things about the royal court have not changed since I ruled.” She drew back a little from the torches, her face cast in cold, gray shadow. “How… comforting.”

They carried on up the passageway, stopping periodically at one of the doors.

“Ah, this one’s just a broom closet.”

...

“They’ve moved the armory. Interesting.”

“No, this is just one of the auxiliary armories. The main armory isn’t anywhere near here.”

“I see. That would make more sense.”

The next room they stopped at was one Star didn’t think she had set foot in for over eight years, but was still extremely familiar to her. She stood straight and still in the doorway, staring into the dark, starlit room while something odd and heavy settled in her chest. “It’s my old nursery,” she said quietly. “It looks just the same…”

Her old crib was still situated off to one side, the jeweled mobile of stars, butterflies and dragonflies glimmering dully in the gloom. The same star-patterned rug was still rolled out on the floor. The same bookcase was still filled with all of the books her parents had read to her when she was a little baby. And there was her rocking-warnicorn and her first toy sword (the one she’d hit Cousin Amalthea over the head with when she was six; _that_ must have been the last time she was in here), and the toy wand full of purple glitter Dad had bought her on a trip to Quest Buy (Mom had thought it was tacky, but let her keep it anyways). They… they hadn’t moved a single thing in or out of this room since Star had been moved to her own room. Was… was that normal?

“Funny,” Eclipsa murmured. “It looks very different to me.”

Some half-hidden catch in her voice made Star turn to look at her. Eclipsa’s eyes were glazed and far-away, her face almost crumpled, lips mashed tightly together.

The odd, heavy sensation in Star’s chest became something like sandpaper grating against sensitive tissue. “Hey, Eclipsa…” She twisted the bell of her wand on and off, on and off, on and off and on again. “Why… don’t you show me that thing you wanted to show me earlier?”

“Of course.” It was as though that moment of—Star wasn’t even sure what it was, maybe openness, had never happened. When Eclipsa spoke, her voice was just as even, her face as smooth as it ever was. “Just follow me.”

And so Star did, even if she found herself eyeing Eclipsa’s back intently as she did so.

Much as they had been in and around Star’s tower, the passageways were labyrinthine here, twisting and turning, branching off in different directions, some of them coming up on dead ends, though Eclipsa never led them to one of those. Just as in the other sections of the castle, Eclipsa always seemed to know exactly where they were going, traversing the shadowy halls with the confidence of someone who’d traversed them countless times.

 _If these passageways lead out of the castle and the exit points aren’t blocked, she could leave any time she wanted to._ Star gnawed on the bell of her wand, but its caramel corn goodness was no comfort tonight. _So why doesn’t she?_

Eclipsa’s ‘tower arrest’ was a joke. The guards didn’t even know when she had been out of her room for hours at a time. She could just… leave. Just go anywhere that wasn’t here, where there were people who’d lock her away in a crystal for the rest of time if her trial didn’t go well for her. So why didn’t she just leave? Was it just because she’d have a heck of a time getting her hands on dimensional scissors, and getting away without them would be super-hard? Or was it something else?

“Eclipsa…” Star’s voice came to her as though from far away. “You never told me what it was you wanted to show me.”

Eclipsa looked at her out of the corner of her eye, her mouth forming a sly, split grin. “That’s because it’s a surprise,” she replied, singsong. “You’ll see soon.”

Star considered mentioning that she didn’t always like surprises too much, but decided to just wait it out. She was holding the skeleton key in her off-hand. Frowning, Star rolled it over in her hand, running her finger along one of the tiny ribs on the handle. She wondered briefly if they all looked like this. Hopefully, they would; the idea of a whole matching set of little skull-and-ribcage skeleton keys would just be too cute.

At least she had this. And her wand. And her fists of iron, when it came down to it, though she hoped it wouldn’t.

They were heading down below again, down every flight of stairs they came upon. Star began to wonder if they were gonna wind up going underground again before Eclipsa finally stopped outside one of the doors. “Star? Come here. I want you to take a good look at the symbol on this door.”

The ‘symbol’, as it turned out, was two gigantic knives crossed at the blades. Star barely had time to mouth a ‘whattt…’ before Eclipsa was asking her for the key as well.

Wordlessly, Star handed it off to her, still staring at the door in consternation. Eclipsa’s hand felt warm against hers in the brief time that the two touched, which was a little surprising. After getting a good look at Eclipsa’s hands, Star had expected them feel cold.

The click of the key turning in the lock was like a cannon going off. Star watched in silence as Eclipsa struggled to get the door open, huffing and puffing as she threw her full weight against it, until finally, Star added her efforts to the mix. Hey, if it turned out to be… well… At least outside of the passageway, Star could head for her parents’ room to get them up.

The room this door opened on was dark and cold, but hardly odorless. Just standing in the dark there for a moment gave Star a whiff of smoke, and the after-odors of cooked meat and bread and gravy, and…

“This is the royal kitchens,” Star said blankly.

Light flared behind her. When she turned, Eclipsa was holding a lit candle in a clear glass bobèche and putting out a match. She beamed. “When your home has a network of secret passageways in it, it’s always useful to know which path leads you to the kitchens, in case you wake up in need of a snack.”

“ _I_ don’t have to go through,” Star muttered, then stopped herself. It was the kitchens. It was just the kitchens. A small smile stole over her lips. “Actually, a midnight snack doesn’t sound so bad right now.”

“Oh, it’s well past midnight, dear,” Eclipsa remarked airily.

They both took to different parts of the kitchen. Star was looking for a box of Captain Blanche’s Sugar Seeds. They’d started keeping the cereal boxes in here once Mom had finally gotten Dad to stop eating all of it before Star could have any, but the problem with that was… Well… Star wasn’t sure how, but Marco had convinced the head chef to hide the boxes so _she_ wouldn’t eat all of it before he could have any. Which was completely unfair; Star would _never_ do something like that. (Anymore…) But no secrets remained hidden for long with Star Butterfly on the case. Captain Blanche’s Sugar Seeds were secreted away in the same pantry where they kept the rice and all the jars of dried pasta noodles. Now, for some milk…

One of the things in Mewni that _had_ changed a lot in the past three hundred years, by Eclipsa, was the Mewni royal kitchens. Not only were the kitchens a lot bigger than they used to be, the place had apparently been renovated at some point, because the great fireplace wasn’t anywhere near where it had been when Eclipsa had lived here. Neither were the bread ovens, the great iceboxes, or the meat lockers. She looked out a window, suddenly visibly agitated, and demanded to know where the smokehouse had gone; it was now in the open area on the opposite side of the kitchens. Eventually, she found what she was looking for, and the eagerness with which she took it out of the cabinet made Star snort. It was a white, porcelain jar with ‘THE ROYAL COOKIE JAR’ spelled out in light blue letters. The Royal Cookie Jar was about to be pillaged.

The table at which the head chef and the senior cooks took their meals was drenched in cold, pale moonlight, so that Eclipsa’s candle was unneeded. It sat between them anyways, burning down, as Star ate her cereal and Eclipsa fished the kinds of cookies she liked out of the Royal Cookie Jar. The key and Star’s wand sat out by the guttering candle. The key glittered as though made of stardust; the wand cast a shadow that reached to the edge of the table, bisecting it.

“So…” Eclipsa swallowed on a chocolate chip cookie and took a sip of her glass of milk. “Do you still find yourself traveling through the dimensions when you sleep?”

Star stirred her cereal restlessly, propping both of her elbows up on the table as she did so. “Every night. Every night I fall asleep,” she clarified. “I’m not sleep-portalling right now, obviously.” She tapped her chin. “Not unless this is a _really_ vivid dream…”

“Well, _I_ am reasonably certain that I’m awake.” Eclipsa looked off outside, tucking a lock of coarse, wiry hair back under her scarf. “Besides, any dream that features me usually involves much more in the way of blood and abominations born of black magic than our adventures tonight.”

That, along with the comment Eclipsa had made earlier about Mewman sacrifice finally made ring a bell that had been trying to sound off in Star’s head for a while. Suddenly, she felt intensely awkward. “I… guess you’ve heard what everybody’s been saying, huh?”

Eclipsa waved a hand. “This is the royal court. Courtiers, servants, guards, they all love to gossip. The stars will fall from the sky and the oceans boil dry before that changes.”

Sure. Star knew that. She might have been a little clueless about some things sometimes, but she was still a _princess_ ; there were some things you were bound to pick up on when you were a princess. Plus, she had some Butterfly cousins who liked gossiping better than they liked breathing. But this? “Doesn’t it bother you? They’re saying all these horrible things about you, and you’re just sitting there like…”

When she said it, it sounded like an accusation. Star hadn’t meant it to; it had just come out that way, the same as a lot of things she said. She took a few quick gulps of cereal, but it had very little taste in her mouth, and wouldn’t settle down properly in her stomach.

Eclipsa didn’t answer her right away. She held her right hand over the candle flame, cupping her hand so that the candlelight was invisible. The wick was nearly out. Pink wax pooled in the bobèche, bubbling lazily. “What I have found,” she said softly, stretching her fingers so that the light shot out from between them, “is that it is always wise to stay abreast of what the court is saying about you. It may not be pleasant to do so, but being caught unawares can be dangerous.” She shook her hand a little, and the light rippled over her pale face. “I’d sooner take the unpleasant over this particular sort of danger.”

Okay, good advice, even if it did raise a _lot_ of questions. But now, Star was finding her eyes drawn irresistibly to the hand Eclipsa was holding up over the candle. In this light, she couldn’t discern any purple, any pulsing veins. It just looked black as starless night. Like it had been burned to a crisp and healed very, very wrong.

Unbidden, memory showed Star her mother taking off one of her gloves to show her a hand and forearm stained black and purplish-black, shot through with black veins, just as Eclipsa’s were. _“Look what her magic did to me._ ”

“Does that ever hurt?” Star asked in a small voice.

She tried to imagine ever hating someone enough to want to use the spell to kill an immortal on them, and found she couldn’t.

Eclipsa looked up abruptly, brow furrowed. “Does what hurt?”

“Your hands…”

 _Look what her magic did to_ her _…_

Star was met with something new from Eclipsa: stunned silence. Eclipsa stared wide-eyed at her, her face frozen, hand trained still over the guttering candle. She let her hand fall to her lap, out of sight. “It… It did, at first,” she half-stammered, still staring at Star as though she had never seen anything quite like her. “There is always pain at the first.” Her face hardened. “But that was long ago, and pain fades. It doesn’t hurt anymore, Star.”

Star nodded wordlessly, unsure of what to say.

Eclipsa stared at her a moment longer. Just as soon as her face had hardened, it melted into a warm, weary smile. “But it’s sweet of you to ask, dear,” she murmured.

Star nodded again, even less sure of what to say.

When the candle finally burned out, neither of them remarked upon it. Star had finished her cereal well before that point; all that was left in the bowl was a little puddle of milk dyed pink by the colored sugar in her Sugar Seeds. After eating what must have been twenty cookies, Eclipsa put the Royal Cookie Jar aside and stared out the window. Rosy candlewax dripped down the stick into the bobèche.

Eclipsa tapped her fingernail against the side of her empty glass and sighed through her nose, nostrils flaring. “Star… About what time in the morning do the kitchen servants usually arrive for work, these days?”

Simple question. Much simpler than most of the other things than had been on Star’s mind that night. She shrugged. “I’m… not really sure? There’ve been some mornings this time of year when I’ve woken up around four in the morning and I can smell them making stew. You know that stuff takes _ages_ to get ready; if they’re gonna have it ready for lunch, they’ve gotta start way early.”

“Four…” Eclipsa drummed her fingernails against the side of the glass, all instead of one. “If that’s so, we should probably leave soon. It wouldn’t do to be caught.”

More like it wouldn’t do for _Eclipsa_ to get caught, but even so, Star found herself nodding. It really wouldn’t do for Star to get caught out of bed in Eclipsa’s company; the Magic High Commission might not even bother with “tests for detecting evil” before crystallizing her this time. Star had been stuck in one of Rhombulus’s crystals before, and she really didn’t want to repeat the experience. Never ever.

Star snatched up the key and her wand, but as they stood up, she paused, frowning at the open doorway into the secret passages. Eclipsa tilted her head slightly, peering at Star’s face. “Star? Are you coming?”

“You…” Star drew a deep breath, and shook her head. “You go ahead. I’ll just head back to my room the other way; no one’s gonna think it’s weird if I say I wanted a snack.” She waved her hand over the table. “I’ll clean all this up; don’t worry about it. Just head back to your tower before the guards catch you.”

She reached forward and pressed the skeleton key into Eclipsa’s hand. Didn’t shrink away from contact with her blackened skin. Refused to shrink away. Star wasn’t sure how much that even meant, but she found that the principle of it was important to her.

Eclipsa nodded and smiled slightly, her face unreadable. “Until next time, then.”

Yeah. Even if she wasn’t sure she was reading all the signs right, Star hoped there would be a next time.


End file.
